In an indispensable hour In the final season of “Succession,” Kendall Roy enters a conference room with his siblings. When the scene opens, W. is seated Announce: “Who will be the successor? Me.”
Of course, this scene didn’t appear on the hit HBO show, but it’s a good illustration of the level of generative AI compared to the real thing. Yet while the Writers Guild of America goes on strike in pursuit of livable working conditions and better streaming remnants, the networks won’t budge from writers’ demands to regulate the use of AI in writers’ rooms.
“Our suggestion is that we’re not required to adapt something that’s an AI production, and that an AI output isn’t considered the work of writers,” comics writer Adam Conover told TechCrunch. “This does not completely exclude that technology from the production process, but it does mean that our working conditions will not be undermined by artificial intelligence.”
But the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) declined to participate in this proposal, instead offering an annual meeting to discuss “developments in technology”.
“When we first made (the proposal), we thought we’d cover our bases – you know, some of our members are concerned about this, the area is moving fast, we’ve got to get ahead of it,” Conover said. “We didn’t think it would be a contentious issue because the fact of the matter is that the current state of text creation technology is completely incapable of writing any work that could be used in production.”
The text generation algorithms behind tools like ChatGPT are not designed to entertain us. Instead, they analyze patterns in huge data sets to respond to requests by determining what is most likely the desired output. So, ChatGPT knows that “Succession” is about an aging media mogul’s kids fighting for control of his company, but it’s unlikely that any dialogue more nuanced than, “Who will be the successor? Me.”
According to Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago and faculty lead on the anti-counterfeiting tool Glaze, AI developments can be used as an excuse for companies to devalue human labor.
“It is in the interest of major studios and companies to overstate ChatGPT capabilities, so that they can, in negotiations at least, undermine and diminish the role of human creators,” Zhao told TechCrunch. “I’m not sure how many people at these big companies actually believe what they say.”
Conover asserted that some parts of a writer’s work are less straightforward than literal screenwriting but also difficult to replicate using AI.
“He goes and meets the decorating department who says, ‘Hey, we can’t actually build this prop you’re imagining, can you do that instead?'” Then you talk to them and go back and write again.” “This is a human enterprise that involves working with other people, and that simply cannot be done by AI.”
Comedian Yeddy Travis sees how AI can be useful in the writers’ room.
“What we do in writers’ rooms is ultimately bounce ideas,” he told TechCrunch. “Even if it’s not very good in and of itself, AI can put together a text in several minutes, compared to a week for human writers, and then editing is easier than writing.”
But even if there is some hope about how humans can benefit from the technology, he worries that studios will see it as just a way to demand more from writers over a shorter period of time.
“He tells me they’re only interested in things being made,” Travis said. “They don’t care about people paying for things that are made.”
The book also advocates regulating the use of artificial intelligence in entertainment as it remains a legal gray area.
“It’s not clear if the work they’re producing is copyrightable, and a movie studio wouldn’t spend $50 to $100 million to shoot a script they didn’t know they owned the copyright to,” Conover said. “So we thought this would be an easy bid for[AMPTP]but they completely stopped it.”
As the Writers Guild of America strikes for the first time since its historic 100-day run in 2007, Conover said he thinks the AI technology debate is “bullshit.” With generative AI at such a primitive stage, writers immediately care about the dreary remnants of streaming and understaffed writing teams. However, the studios’ refusal of union requests regarding AI only reinforces the underlying issue: The people who run Hollywood aren’t getting their fair share.
“Conover said, “I’m not worried about technology.” “I worry about companies using technology, which is actually not very good, to undermine our working conditions.”